Getting started

Open Ducter on your Mac, say one thing, and get your first finished task back, with proof.

This page walks you from opening Ducter on your Mac to your first finished task. It takes about five minutes, and there is nothing to learn first: you write to your partner the way you would write to a colleague.

What you need

• A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later).
• An AI agent: Claude Code or Codex, signed in with your own account (which agents). Ducter does its work through the plan you already have. If neither is set up yet, Ducter installs one for you in the next step.
• The Ducter app. A download is coming soon. Until then, someone builds it once from the source and hands you Ducter.dmg, or you build it yourself: see Install.

1. Open Ducter

Open the .dmg, drag Ducter onto Applications, and open it from there. The first time, macOS asks whether you want to open an app downloaded from the Internet: choose Open. (If your copy wasn’t signed by its builder, macOS needs one extra step; Troubleshooting shows it.)

Ducter then looks around your Mac for a few seconds:

• “Checking this Mac…” It looks for Claude Code and Codex and whether you’re signed in.
• If neither is ready, you see “Pick one, install it and sign in”, with one row for Claude Code and one for Codex. Click Install: Ducter runs the tool’s official installer into your own folders (no administrator password, no Terminal) and shows how long it’s been. Then click Sign in and finish in your browser. “This continues by itself”: when it’s done, you see All set. If something goes wrong, the row says what happened in plain words, with Try again and Do it in Terminal.
• “What should I be called?” Give your partner a name, or keep Ducter. (If you use Nowledge Mem, your partner already has a name and this is skipped.)
• “Getting Ducter ready…” From now on Ducter keeps working when you close the window. To stop it, choose Stop Ducter in the menu. macOS may show a “Background Items Added” notice right after: that’s Ducter working in the background, and there’s nothing to do.

2. Say one thing

The conversation opens with a greeting and three suggestions. If you keep code on this Mac, the suggestions are about the projects you touched most recently, for example “Find the failing tests in my-app, fix them, and tell me”. Ducter found them from the folder names only; it didn’t open anything inside.

Tap a suggestion to put it in the box (it never sends by itself), change it if you like, and press Return. Or write anything of your own:

• A quick question gets a quick answer, right there.
• Bigger work becomes a task. Your partner says what it’s starting, and the task works on its own while you do something else.

Coding tasks work in their own copy of your project, on their own branch (named ducter/…), so your own checkout is left alone.

3. Get your first result

While a task works, there’s nothing to watch. Silence means it’s going fine. When it’s done, it comes back to the conversation. The very first time, a small line says “Your first task is done. Everything I finish comes back to you like this, with how I checked it.”

A finished result tells you:

• what it did, in a few lines;
• how it checked, in one short line, such as 412 tests pass;
• how many files changed (click it to see the changes);
• anything that left your computer, on a line marked ↗. If nothing did, there’s no such line.

Then you choose: Merge into main or Open draft PR. Merging is always your call.

In our own runs, a small “fix the failing tests” task came back done in under a minute.

What happens next

• Decisions come with a default. When a task needs you, you see a question like “Rebase before merging?” with a suggested answer. Press Go to take it, Hold for “not yet”, or Reply… in your own words.
• On hand shows every task at a glance and what’s waiting for you. Open any task to read What it did, see its changes, and talk to it directly.
• Close the window whenever you like. Ducter keeps working. The Dock icon brings the window back, and its badge counts what is waiting for you.
• A few small offers come later, one at a time, each with Later: notifications on this Mac when you need to decide something (after your first result), finding Ducter on your phone, and Nowledge Mem so your partner remembers for longer.
• Use it from Terminal too. After your partner’s first reply, Ducter offers once: “Use ducter in Terminal too?” Say yes, and ducter status works in any new Terminal window.

Next: put Ducter on your phone, or on a server that stays on so it keeps working while your Mac sleeps.